The PowerPoint® Blog

I work with PowerPoint on a daily basis and I am very honored to be a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. We have a talented team of presentation designers at TLC Creative Services and ThePowerPointBlog is our area to highlight PowerPoint tips, tricks, examples and tutorials. Enjoy! Troy Chollar

Creating the “Open Again” Image in PPT

Yesterday’s post used a fun image that was downloaded from Fotolia.com and completely customized in PowerPoint. Here is what I did:

1. Research and download image from Fotolia.com (where TLC Creative Services has a subscription plan), then insert on slide.

2. Frame the right and bottom of the image with gradient lines.

3. Add a white box (white to match the slide background color).

4. Size and position the white box to cover the existing text.

5. Add PPT text with the new message using a custom font, same fill color as the marker in the image and positioned right over the marker.

6. Done – no Photoshop needed.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:23:07-07:00July 2nd, 2012|Tutorial|

July and a New Start!

Greetings to all that think I fell off the internet. I did not fall off, just into more projects and work needs than ever expected, which is good, so I am not complaining (but whining a bit)!

July, with Independence Day and celebrations of Freedom, seems like a great time to get things back in motion. The new TLC Creative Services office is up and running, great design projects are in process, and I just finished a fantastic 2 week family holiday that gave me some time to relax and refocus. All together, things are good and I am excited to have a game plan for ThePowerPointBlog again!

A few adjustments have been put in place to assure things are steadily posted:
– 3 posts per week (generally Mon-Wed-Fri)
– The full TLC Creative Services staff is now a part of writing posts
– Posts by guests are in the rotation

So tomorrow, Monday, is the first PPT post, Wednesday is a great 4th of July themed template that anyone is free to download and use, and there are a lot of reviews, tutorials and example posts all created and queued up!

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:23:29-07:00July 1st, 2012|Personal|

Instant Eyedropper – New Favorite Tool!

This FREE tool is a must for every designer, tech, and creative using a PC – the Instant Eyedropper tool is the easiest way I’ve found to quickly identify and use colors on screen.

Instant Eyedropper is accessed through the system tray and is easy to use. Click the icon to launch, hover around the display until you get to the color that needs identification, and click to copy the HEX code right to the clipboard.

By |2021-05-01T16:19:20-07:00May 10th, 2012|Resource/Misc|

Doctors, Videos, and Presentations

Amber and I spent the week in Chicago managing the presentations for 130 Doctors. Internal medicine has been revolutionized by micro video camera technology – unfortunately, the same cannot be said for standard video CoDecs and videos working smoothly in every presentation. Happy to report that with very few exceptions, our work pre-flighting (great term from my print designer days) resulted in seamless presentations.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:24:06-07:00April 18th, 2012|Personal|

Add Slides to a Presentation and Keep Their Original Look

Adding slides from one presentation into another and hoping for a button that will automatically format the slides the way needed is just not a feature in PowerPoint. But, the almost magical “Destination vs. Source Formatting” button does exist. For this tutorial, we are going to add slides from the “Blue” presentation (Presentation #1) to the “Purple” presentation (Presentation #2) and keep the blue slides blue (ie. opposite of the last tutorial where the slides updated to the purple template).

Here is our “Blue” presentation (#1):

And here is our “Purple” presentation (#2):

Select the slides from Presentation #1 and copy. Then paste them into Presentation #2. To paste in the new slides, right-click and in the pop-up menu in the “Paste Options” sections, select “KEEP SOURCE FORMATTING:”

With the KEEP SOURCE FORMATTING option the template for the new slides keeps the template that was used in Presentation #1. So the blue slides stay blue.

Behind the scenes what happens is a new Master Slide set is added to the presentation. So if you look in the slide layouts (HOME >> SLIDES section >> LAYOUTS) there are two master slide sets to choose from (Presentation #1 and Presentation #2).

NOTE: If you paste in more slides from the Blue presentation in a new location and select KEEP SOURCE FORMATTING another blue master slide set will be added (which is not optimal).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:25:02-07:00April 8th, 2012|Tutorial|

Add Slides to a Presentation That Fit In

Adding slides from one presentation into another and hoping for a button that will automatically format the slides the way needed is just not a feature in PowerPoint. But, the almost magical “Destination vs. Source Formatting” button does exist. For this tutorial, we are going to add slides from the “Blue” presentation (Presentation #1) to the “Purple” presentation (Presentation #2) and make all of the slides the same, so they are all purple.

Here is our “blue” presentation (#1):

And here is our “purple” presentation (#2):

Select the slides from Presentation #1 and copy. The paste them into Presentation #2. To paste in the new slides, right-click and in the pop-up menu in the “Paste Options” sections select “Use Destination Theme:”

With the USE DESTINATION THEME option, the template for the new slides is assigned to the template used on the slide in front of the insert point. So now all of the blue slides are changed to the purple template.

*Note: There is no “magic” button and with this example the text boxes, background, colors used, etc. were all setup correctly using the template formatting (which also means it is a real template). When updating to the new (purple) template all of the master slide formatting carries over just fine. But there are lots of times when things are not based on template formatting and need to be manually updated (ie. no magic format button).

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:25:27-07:00April 6th, 2012|Tutorial|

Adobe CS 6 is Coming – and FREE Upgrade Offer

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat are all common applications we use for presentation projects. Adobe has (finally) announced the time frame for CS6 to be released AND is offering the largest free upgrade they have ever done!


Release date for Adobe CS 6:
By May 31, 2012Free Upgrade:
Purchase Adobe CS 5.5 through May 6, 2012 and receive a one-time upgrade to Adobe CS 6 free.Details for the upgrade offer from the Adobe site are here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:25:56-07:00April 4th, 2012|Resource/Misc|

Why Are The Shadows Not Animating?

Have you run into the issue of during the slide show an animated bullet list of text has the text shadow visible and then the full text animates on top of the shadow? It is a scenario that started with PPT 2007. The good news is, it is not a bug in the program and it is easy to “fix.”

Scenario:
You have shadow effects on your text and a great on-click animation.

But when you view as a slide show, the shadow of the text is not animating!

To Fix:
1. Select the text box.

2. Go to FORMAT >> SHAPE EFFECTS >> SHADOW and change the selection to NO SHADOW.

3. With the text box still selected, go to FORMAT >> TEXT EFFECTS >> SHADOW and choose the shadow style needed.

4. Now when you run as a slide show everything appears when animated!

Why:
PowerPoint has always had two types of shadows: Shape and Text shadows. In PPT 2003, there was really no visual difference between them (at the code level, the two shadow types were different). Starting with PPT 2007, the difference between the two shadows types made a difference in how things are displayed. The non-animating text shadow is the most common way this shows up.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-08-16T09:26:21-07:00April 2nd, 2012|Tutorial|
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